Open Access Helper

Privacy Policy

Open Access Helper for Safari (macOS), Open Access Helper for iOS and https://www.oahelper.org/ are a free service, available to you at no charge.

I do my very best to limit the amount of data collected to the absolute bare minimum. In this document I will outline what, how and when I do something.

I have compiled this information myself. As I am not a lawyer, let’s talk about your questions. You can reach me at Privacy Policy Questions

Information Collection and Use

The app keeps a count of Open Access (OA) Searches, OA Found, core.ac.uk PDFs, the current number of Bookmarks (etc). If you select to share this data with me (this is the default), the app will communicate these values once a month to my server, without including personally identifiable information.

You will be able to see the data and the date these values were shared within the settings section of the app. The purpose for this information is to help me understand where to invest development time.

If you enable the CORE Recommender feature, the app will request recommendations via this server (oahelper.org). The data submitted will be the title of the paper, the abstract, the URL and DOI. There is no unique device id or anything that could identify you personally. My server will obtain the recommendation from core.ac.uk and then respond to the app. In case the server has processed a recommendation request for this document (based on DOI) within the last seven (7) days, it will serve the recommendation from cache.

For the purpose of this website, I set some basic WordPress related cookies, and I collect normal server logs (Apache).

Within the Apache Logs your IP Address has been treated, so that the last octet is removed (e.g. 101.111.112.113 will turn to 101.111.112.0).

Furthermore Apache Server logs contain information submitted by your browser, such as Operating System, Browser & Version, language preferences, date and time…

This site is hosted on a virtual private server at Linode, LLC.

For the app to function I might call the following APIs (based on your preferences)

Additionally the macOS app will follow every link returned by these APIs to determine, whether you might already be at the final hosting location. This happens within the extension (app) itself. However each node in the redirect, will see your IP Address. This is not done on iOS.

If you send me an E-Mail it will be forwarded to GMAIL and is kept and stored there.

Log Data

Only Apache Server Logs are created and only when you visit this website, the app itself only communicate limited usage information to me, if your settings permit it.

As outlined already, the DOI is sent to unpaywall.org / core.ac.uk / openaccessbutton.org to be resolved and an Open Access version to be found.

For citation counts the DOI is sent to opencitations.net. The iOS app offers a search feature, which will send a query to core.ac.uk via API. Their Privacy Policy is found here.

Please see information about information collection and use above. A sample log entry looks like this. Kindly remember that the last 0 in the IP is the anonymized IP mentioned further above:

93.197.125.0 - - [04/Nov/2018:13:34:36 +0100] "GET /oahelper HTTP/1.1" 301 553 "-"
"Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_14) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko)
Version/12.0 Safari/605.1.15"


Up to Version 2020.5 (macOS) and 2020.4 (iOS):

For users, who elected to share usage data with me, once a month data that is similar to this will be submitted. 

id oa found oa serach core pdf bookmark count recom count recom view uid

date
100 2 3 0 0 0 0 xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxx {timestamp}

You will find that the above includes a UID, this uuid is a privacy conscious unique device id, issued by iOS upon developer request. Imagine two apps on your iOS device, both requesting a uuid, they would be given different uuids.

As you will have notice the data represents basic integers only, they don’t give any indication as to who you are, what you searched for or viewed. They simply provide a crude meassure of usage and will help future feature development.

As of Version 2020.5 (macOS) and 2020.4 (iOS / iPad OS) this data is no longer collected.

Cookies

This site uses WordPress and WordPress typical cookies are set.

Contact

With any questions, you can reach me at:

Claus Wolf
Am Hergert 1
64853 Otzberg
Germany
info [at] oahelper.org

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